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The Anti-Pattern Organisation
This document examines the anti-patterns for Wardley Mapping, which are the reverse of the best practices for understanding an organisation's landscape. It describes what an organisation that doesn't understand its landscape would look like, covering areas such as failing to focus on user needs, using a common language, being transparent, challenging assumptions, removing duplication and bias, using appropriate methods, thinking small, and designing for constant evolution.
Fails to Focus on User Needs
The anti-pattern organisation has an inability to describe its user needs and often confuses its own needs — profitability, revenue, data acquisition — with those of its customers.
Fails to Use a Common Language
The anti-pattern organisation uses multiple different ways of describing the same problem space, e.g. box and wire diagrams, business process diagrams and stories. This often leads to confusion and misalignment, as none of the tools used will meet the basic characteristics of any map — visual, context specific, position (relative to an anchor), movement and components.
Fails to be Transparent
The anti-pattern organisation has difficulty in answering basic questions such as "How many IoT projects are we building?" Information tends to be guarded in silos.
Fails to Challenge Assumptions
The anti-pattern organisation often takes action based upon memes, the highest paid person's opinion, or popular articles in the Harvard Business Review. Parts of the organisation will admit to building things they know won't work.
Fails to Remove Duplication and Bias
The scale of duplication in the anti-pattern organisation is excessive and exceeds what people expect. Investigation will discover groups custom building what exists as a commodity in the outside world. There is often resistance to changing this because it is seen as unique, despite an inability to explain user needs.
Fails to Use Appropriate Methods
The anti-pattern organisation tends towards single size methods across the organisation, e.g. "outsource all of IT" or "use Agile everywhere". This can often be accompanied with a yo-yo between one method and a new naked emperor, based upon its success in a specific example (outcome bias).
Fails to Think Small
The anti-pattern organisation tends toward big scale efforts (e.g. Death Star projects) and big departments. This can include frequent major platform re-engineering efforts or major re-organisations.
Fails to Think Aptitude and Attitude
The anti-pattern organisation tends to consider all of a specific aptitude (e.g. finance, operations or IT) as though it's one thing. It promotes a mantra of there is only "IT", rather than a nuanced message of multiple types. It tends to create general training courses covering the entire subject, e.g. "Let's send everyone on agile training."
Fails to Enable Purpose, Mastery and Autonomy
The anti-pattern organisation often has confusion over its purpose, combined with feelings of lacking control and inability to influence.
Fails to Understand Basic Economic Patterns
The anti-pattern organisation often conducts efficiency or innovation programmes without realising the connection between the two. It assumes it has choice on change (e.g. cloud), where none exists, and fails to recognise and cope with its own inertia caused by past success.
Fails to Understand Context-Specific Play
The anti-pattern organisation has no existing language that enables it to understand context-specific play. It often uses terms as memes, e.g. open source, ecosystem, innovation, but with no clear understanding of where they are appropriate.
Fails to Understand the Landscape
The anti-pattern organisation tends to not fully grasp the components and complexity within its own organisation. Often, it cannot describe its own basic capabilities.
Fails to Understand Strategy
The anti-pattern organisation is dominated by statements that strategy is all about the why, but it cannot distinguish between the why of purpose and the why of movement. It has little discussion on position and movement, combined with an inability to describe where it should attack or even the importance of understanding where before why. Often, strategy is little more than a tyranny of action statements based upon meme copying and external advice.